Shrugging, he wet the tip of the filter with his tongue, fired it up with a bright-yellow lighter and took a deep, long drag.

I watched the swirling cloud of smoke for a minute, before he spoke again. ‘Hi, by the way. I’m Kage.’

You are, aren’t you? ‘Tara. Well, Nayantara, but no one calls me that.’

The song ended. He said, ‘Have you heard their new album? It’s amazing.’

Be cool, be cool. ‘Nope. I’ll have to check it out, then.’

‘Where do you live? I’ll bring it over.’

‘Really? I mean, won’t your parents mind?’

He shrugged. ‘I drive.’

Western Music had inaugurated Shamiana with a bang. St Jude’s deposited ninety points into their coffers for winning it, and everyone was looking to beat the fast favourites over the course of the next few days. Of course, the other events— lesser things, like writing and photography, collaging and math contests—didn’t carry as much weight; points out of twenty, groupies never above zero. But there were lots of them, collectively adding up to three hundred points. We could all perpetrate the lie that every school still had a shot; Shamiana was anyone’s to win. It would all come to an end with the dance competition on the last day, another hundred-point battle that would take place under rented strobes to the foreign, fascinating sounds of Ibiza anthems that only the cool kids knew about. Watching the dancers move to Oakenfold in synchronized beats and fluid jerks, their bones like water, was the first time a lot of us got that heady, smoky feeling we’d come to recognize as Friday night after nine rounds in a few years. That stage boils the blood of a generation straight into the pounding heart of clubs.

I took to the lesser glory of my stage—a dank classroom on the third floor of a building on the edge of the grounds. The room bore the faint aroma of a dozen kids who spent all their time inside books, climbing six flights of steep stairs.

Some bespectacled member of our ilk distributed foolscap sheets, and an older lady, probably a teacher, came in and wrote down the topic on the blackboard.

Write a thoughtfully constructed creative piece on how you would make India a better place, in 2000 words or less. Time remaining: 2 hours

I couldn’t think of anything. This was supposed to be a creative writing competition; the fuck was this Miss World-esque topic?

Bespectacled hands around me were flying across foolscap. I dozed off for a while.